The wiki says the OSM front end on openstreetmap.org is using GeoNames for the search. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geonames Wondering because I might implement search functionality for a map myself, and because I'm curious. How come GeoNames is used? Are there any benefits of doing this, instead of pulling the data from OSM? I mean locations and names are in the OSM dataset.

The wiki says the OSM front end on openstreetmap.org is using GeoNames for the search. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geonames Wondering because I might implement search functionality for a map myself, and because I'm curious. How come GeoNames is used? Are there any benefits of doing this, instead of pulling the data from OSM? I mean locations and names are in the OSM dataset.